(Images via Kellogg’s)
Whether your stomach’s half full or half empty, there’s always more room to fill it with full-filling cupcakes. But if you’d rather circumvent common cupped and caked frustrations (why are my hands so oily? where do I put this damp, crumb-covered liner? why have we as a culture recognized Funfetti’s flavorlessly sweetened sovereignty?), then there are about to be two new and newly returned Pop-Tarts that’ll make your morning dessert a little less messy. Continue reading
Wait, what the heck are these big flat things?
Steamrolled Pop-Tarts Bites? Stretch Armstrong-ed Pop-Tarts Crisps? The assimilated sentience of several dozen Pop-Tarts Cereal pieces?
Oh, right: I remember those retro rectangles now. Original Pop-Tarts—or OG PTs, as the kids may very well say—were what Kellogg’s used to make way back in 2018, before they seemingly decided to infuse essential Pop-Tart oils into every other snack product imaginable.
But after three spin-offs (that are really re-educated old school products), Pop-Tarts has finally released a new full-sized pastry, too (even if it’s really the latest in a long, long line of its kind). It’s called Crisp Apple, and it foregoes much of the flamboyant detailing of its apple’d ancestors in favor of a simplistic sauce blanche, almost exactly like that seen on Apple Blast Pop-Tarts—a flavor available in the U.K. since 2014.
But will this version be as American as apple handpies, or will its apple fall a few furlongs too far from its frosted family tree? Let me untwist my tongue and put it to work.
Go ahead: try and name a type of food that wouldn’t work as an adapted Pop-Tart.
A Pop-Tart Casserole? Ha, you doubt the binding power of sweet potato and marshmallow fluff.
Pop-Tart Steak? Psh, what is a grill but a giant toaster?
Pop-Tart Ravioli? I’m not even going there.
The point is that we probably shouldn’t expect Pop-Tarts’ attempted assimilation of the entire grocery store any time soon. They’ve already got the breakfast game on lock, in their classic form and in these new Pop-Tart Cereals. And their latest pouched, lunchtime snacks are poised to make Mother’s Animal Crackers cry Uncle by February. By this time next year, we’ll be eating Pop-Tarts-flavored Pop-Tarts for post-dinner breakfast. Assuming we left room after that schuh-rumptious Pop-Tarts Bolognese you made, Mrs. G. Seriously, my compliments.
Pop-Tart Bites and Crisps already wowed me, so I’m entering this first-of-the-year review with enthusiastic resolve: to eat more shape-shifting pastries than last year, in more forms than ever before. After all, Pop-Tart Cereal is the post-Internet-killing-the-video-star descendant of Pop-Tarts Crunch, a cereal remembered with near-universal fondness. What could go wrong?
Calling it now: 2019 is going to be the year of zany breakfast peripherals.
Just as the ’80s and early 2000s video game industries saw an influx of variably successful light guns, and philharmonic orchestra’s worth of plastic instruments, the 2k1x’s penultimate year is already promising a wealth of niche offshoots for familiar breakfast brands.
Whether any of these budding taste-buddies will make it into a Smash Bros. game is another story, but if the first creatively derived Pop-Tartform I tried is any indication, we might have to raise regular Pop-Tarts to the rafters like foil-wrapped fading stars.
So while I wait for Pop-Tarts Cereal to complete Kellogg’s new almost-er pastry trifecta, it’s time to crack open perhaps the most understated and underhyped of the three: Pop-Tarts Crisps.
Understanding the pervasive appeal of Pop-Tarts Bites is easy:
Would you rather have a bite of pie, or a bite of entire pie?
A red Skittle or a concentrated rainbow pill?
The east wall of a gingerbread house, or the entire 20-acre gingerbread farm?
My point is that while any individual bite of a Pop-Tart—which maxes out at around a quarter-Tart in extreme cases, or at least in my own—cannot possibly contain the same measured deliciousness as the entirety of a Pop-Tart, as in all of the crust and everything inside, in one bite. It’s like having a party-sized pizza, which typically have contentiously hand-soiling Cheese Only slices, vs. a whole-crust-and-kaboodle Pizza Roll.
Yes, Pop-Tarts Bites are tasty enough to surpass my typically quasi-topical recipe for review introductions. These spiritual successors to Pop-Tarts Mini Crisps (née Popsters) naturally come in the toaster pastry brand’s two unshakeable pillars of flavor: Strawberry & Brown Sugar Cinnamon. The de facto Pop-Tarts royal family will begin appearing in all their shrunken glory come January, but for now, I was postally blessed via Kellogg’s with enough pouches to last me ’til Christmas (edit: Christmas Eve) (edit 2: Christmas Eve Eve).
(edit 3: I need to stop eating these)
(Update: We reviewed them!)
Is Pop-Tarts getting the gang back together?
Hear me out: Pop-Tarts history is rich with not only decadent filling, but with convenience-focused pastry offshoots, too. And from the mid-’90s up until just a few years ago, these cult classic pieces of Pop-Tart paraphernalia have died off, leaving only the humble P-T in its original, rectangularly sugar-sandwiched form.
But in the span of just a few months, it’s beginning to look like Pop-Tarts isn’t just reanimating one of its bite-, fun-, and nibble-sized products, but nearly all of them. First we heard that Pop-Tarts Crunch will be back (in both classic varieties), by early 2019.
Then came the spiritual successor of Pop-Tarts Mini-Crisps, the poshly pouched Pop-Tarts Bites, which will also come in the brand’s flagship flavors of Strawberry and Brown Sugar Cinnamon.
And now that we have confirmation of “new” Pop-Tarts Crisps—in, surprise surprise, “Strawberrylicious” and “Brown Sugar Cinnamazing”—that means the toaster pastry leviathan’s oft-forgotten Snak-Stix are also (sort of) back. You know, to fill our stomachs and couch cushions with crispy-crumbly Pop-Tarts flavor in a wafered-enough form to justify it as a light, pre-breakfast snack.
While they’re still filled, it remains to be seen just how well these Pop-Tarts Crisps—which look more like, in a highly complimentary way, iced cross-sections of cardboard than Pop-Tarts—will stack up against their pastry predecessors, but for now, this news leaves me with two important questions to ponder:
1) Will S’Mores, let alone Cookies & Cream, ever get another chance at spin-off stardom?
2) And more importantly, will Go-Tarts come back next to complete the crunchy quadrilogy?
I need my grippable, Go-Gurt sized Pop-Tart fix, people!
If bizarre sci-fi television series from the ’90s have taught me anything, it’s that there are parallel versions of this world couched in other universes. Some have minor differences, like a perplexing land in which Thanksgiving is celebrated in October. In others, though, we might see some truly uncanny results of the Butterfly Effect. It seems Trader Joe’s mad scientist cousin (unlike Trader José, Dr. Trader Cornelius lacked the name chops for his family’s grocery biz) has been messing with enriched choclanium again, because my preferred cozy beverage has merged with another snackish reality, just like that time Captain America met Batman.
Trader Joe’s Organic Hot Cocoa Frosted Toaster Pastries arrived as something of a dark horse (see, it works as a reference to both comic books and chocolate… I’m a lonely man, OK?). Without much heralding, these sly slats of sweet science turned up on shelves recently, if a bit out-of-season given their clear holiday vibe. The packaging is plain in that TJ’s way, so we get no hints on the flavor there. Best to dive in and see what’s on the other end of this iced nexus.
